“There they are,” said Weiss, pointing.
“My God,” Tucker whispered. “My God.”
“I count twelve,” Weiss said.
“Yeah,” said Tucker. “Looks like nine adults and three calves.”
The Rover descended the ridge, then sped along the hardpan close to the water. No one except the police seemed to be there. A group of sheriffs deputies were pounding stakes and stringing bright orange tape between them.
“They’re treating this like a crime scene,” said Tucker.
Weiss noticed a van marked Sea World of Orlando approaching from the opposite direction.
“Maybe it is,” he said.
They stopped the Rover at the police line. Weiss and Tucker showed their press badges to a deputy and swung under the tape.
“Christ, you boys are here before the gawkers,” said the deputy.
“It pays to pay your sources,” Weiss answered. He signaled for Tucker to follow.
“Damn,” said Tucker, fanning his free hand in front of his face. The other held a Mini-cam.
“Here.”
“Suntan lotion?”
“Smear it on your nose. Shit, Zeke, after all this time I still have to mother you. The ozone layer’s shot to hell. Remember? We did a story on it last year.”
The first carcass they inspected was a calf. It lay on its side, its one visible eye the color of milk, its skin sunk between its ribs in deep troughs. Seaweed clogged the strips of baleen in its open mouth.
Weiss paced it off, ignoring the ankle-deep water that sloshed over his Hush Puppies. Eight paces, plus. Twenty-five feet.
“Make sure I’m in the frame for perspective,” he said.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Tucker. Weiss constantly harped at him, but rarely about something as elementary as perspective. This whale beaching bothered him.
“These are the same kind we saw in San Diego last week,” said Weiss. “Right whales. You can tell by the curving mouth and the callosities on the adults’ faces. The old Nantucket whalers used to call them right whales because they didn’t sink when you harpooned them; they were the right whales to go after.”
“Since when did you become an expert on whales?”
“Since last week.”
Weiss waved Tucker over to a full-grown bull. This one was fifty feet long and, flat on its belly, was twice as tall as Weiss. Its baleen plates splayed out from its mouth like the bristles of a worn-out broom. Weiss pressed between two ribs. The rubbery skin yielded easily and did not bounce back when he released his hand.
“I’ll be a sonofabitch,” said Weiss. He grabbed Tucker by the shoulder. “You shoot every one of these babies. I want to look around.”
Weiss slogged from carcass to carcass, borne by a sense of unreality. The dead white eyes, the sunken flesh, the tattered baleen, even the symmetry with which the ocean had coughed up its victims smacked of a dream. But it was real; something strange was happening. He had felt it a week earlier when he and Tucker chanced upon the pod of right whales stranded on a beach north of San Diego. He felt it again that morning when word of a drunken beachcomber’s find reached the motel. Now, seeing huge carcasses for the second time in eight days, he was convinced. Animals as large as whales did not die en masse without there being something very wrong with the world.
The Sea World van had multiplied into four. A swarm of employees, all young enough to be summer help, were unloading gear and fanning out among the carcasses. Weiss approached the only employee who was not moving at double-time, a young woman securing her long red hair with a pin.
“Do you have a boss?”
“Professor Adamski.”
“Ted Adamski?” asked Weiss.
The woman nodded. She had a pert little nose sprinkled with freckles. Photogenic. She pointed toward a man leaning into the back of one of the vans. As Weiss moved closer, he recognized the bald spot and the leathery skin set off by the scraggly white beard. He called the professor’s name. Adamski straightened up as if his back ached.
“Weiss,” he said. “You are like a bad dream.”
“I guess that’s better than being a bad penny.” Weiss reached for Adamski’s hand but the marine biologist did not reciprocate.